I’ll start by making clear that I am a regular Wal-Mart shopper for our normal household goods. As for Wal-Mart online, is another story. In fact it’s this story.
My favorite Panasonic DVD record went belly up recently and I’ve been watching for good deals on a replacement. I got pretty excited when on Thursday 6/26/08 I saw that Wal-Mart had marked a unit as "clearance" and at a price of $138 (wow). Being married, I of course waited until my wife and I discussed before going ahead with the purchase. I came back on Friday 6/27/08 to purchase the unit and found it was no longer on "clearance" and the price had gone up to $170. Seemed kind of odd that a "clearance" item would suddenly NOT be in clearance a day later, but assumed I missed my chance and was able to find the same unit for $135 via Amazon.com (thanks Amazon!).
Now it gets good. Saturday (out of morbid curiosity), I checked the price of the unit at Wal-Mart online again and now on 6/28/08 it was still not on "clearance", but the price was dropped to $130. So in 48 hours it went up $32 and then back down again $40. I could not resist e-mailing them thinking that surely there was a system error going on (I hoped) as I wanted to think that they weren’t playing games with all of us on their website.
The first response was the standard insulting boilerplate email thanking me for contacting them and claiming "At Walmart.com, we have the same pricing policy as your local Wal-Mart store,…". REALLY? I don’t recall my local store changing the price by $30 and $40 on a DAILY basis. This only fired me up more. My reply email included that insulting me with what amounts to no response is not needed and again pushed them "You inflated the price $32 on Friday, then dropped it $40 on Saturday. You need to fix that or you’ll lose a lot more customers." Thinking they will surely hit delete and ignore me at this point, they decide to dig their hole deeper advising me that "I am writing to inform you that prices at Walmart.com are subject to change without prior notice."
Things I’ve learned from this:
1. We are probably all getting charged between $32-$40 more than we should for the electronics carried at Wal-Mart based on how willing they are to lower and raise the price daily.
2. Although modern business dictates that you have to answer/response to any comment or complaint from a customer to qualify as good customer service is simply not true. I would not have blogged this at all had they simply read my email. Passed it on to a supervisor (in case they wanted to change policy). Then delete my message with no response. I only intended to advise them that I saw what they were doing and they aren’t fooling all of us. Even a simple lie would have been a better business choice and told me that the fluctuation is not normal and you’re looking into would have shut me up really quick and made me feel I did a good thing by pointing it out.
3. Amazon.com is awesome! Easily find the exact product and model number you are looking for and get a nice selection of businesses to purchase it from depending on your preference.
